I have a few spare cards hanging around, and my main card is only a dual-output. I can drop in an old S3 ViRGE for one of the wings (or even two of them -- I think I have four spares). It would also help clear out some of the junk I have laying around.
It's a niche study, and so I trust the hurricane researchers on the subject more than a general climatologist, much as I would trust a vulcanologist about when an eruption might occur more than I would trust a general-study geologist. The former may have a wider breadth of knowledge, but sometimes depth trumps breadth.
In much the same way as most general climatologists agree that global warming is caused largely by humans, most hurricane researchers seem to agree that the upswing was expected, and while it was quite the wild ride, it was probably an anomaly and not directly related to global warming. It will be interesting to see how many storms come through this year, and how strong they are overall.
Actually, the last Peacekeeper MX was decommissioned in September 2005, and the rocket bodies are being converted to satellite launchers. The remaining Minutemen missiles are having their older warheads replaced with safer, more accurate warheads from the Peacekeepers, though only one warhead is going in each missile to replace the MIRV setup (three each, IIRC) that was there before. In addition, a couple of wings of Minutement were decommissioned, with some of the missiles going to other wings, but a number of them decommissioned. The majority of the nuclear deterrent remains with the Navy's boomers.
Does it bother you that hurricane researchers have said repeatedly that global warming had little or nothing to do with it, and that there was an expected upswell of activity due starting last year, give or take? Or that the US coastline had been dodging the averages for the better part of 20 years, with a far smaller fraction of hurricane strikes than the historic record would otherwise suggest? What will you be saying if the next hurricane season shows lower activity than the last?
That's an interesting idea, and perhaps not too expensive. It may also lend an interesting look to the desktop layout. In addition, having reference documents open in the wings would be easy to do, with primary work in the center.
I shall look into this. Thank you for the suggestion.
People like me who feel constrained by 1280x1024. I've been using 1600x1200 for years, and it can be distracting for me to use lower resolutions. I'd really like to have a nice LCD capable of 1600x1200 (or better) resolution on my desk, but they're still too expensive for me to be able to just drop coin. I have a secondary screen that is nearly dead, and is only good for 800x600 anyway (and ten years of service is a good run), so I may replace that soon with something of a relatively low resolution, but for the main screen, I have to have something high-res.
California is doing this, too. I heard the radio ads a couple of times yesterday for a California Assembly bill, AB2987, that Verizon is backing in an attempt to leverage public support for their efforts to add video services over their private fiber-optic network. The claim within the commercial is that this will have the benefit of increasing competition for customers, thus lowering prices for everyone involved.
Honestly, if Verizon is willing to run fiber into my apartment at decent rates, I'm willing to consider whatever video services they have to offer. I have a maxed-out cable/internet subscription from Adelphia, and it's $150 per month. A couple of years ago, I paid only $120 per month for substantially the same service (albeit with a 3Mbps internet downlink instead of 5Mbps).
Those don't deal with prism at all, though. Prism has to do with the eyes not aligning properly. You can have perfect vision and yet have a prism effect strong enough to require glasses. They force the eyes to align properly by having the center of focus be off-axis. I have an inward-facing prism, which means that my eyes need to be pulled outward; my optometrist has said that there's really not much of a solution out there for this. If I had the reverse situation there are exercises that can be done to pull the eyes inward (focusing on an object pulled towards the nose, for example).
It's quite legal to drive a car you own even without a license, provided you do so only on private land. You can own a truck on a farm and drive it around on that without having a license so long as you never drive it on the public road running next to the land.
I wear glasses for nearsightedness, astigmatism, and inward prism. My optometrist told me last year that I can take care of the first two with laser surgery, but the prism is likely going to have me wearing glasses for the rest of my life. Have you heard of anything that can deal with prism? I realize it's not directly related to the vision clarity, but glasses are annoying.
No, it hasn't ended. It's just been made a lot more difficult for smaller nations. Larger nations like China and Russia (and perhaps India) can launch them from distances sufficiently far away from safe zones where this would fly to make it difficult to shoot them down. The ABL's primary goal is to take out missiles in the boost phase, often when they're over the launcher's territory, so they have to be within a few hundred miles of the launch site to be of any use. Whether they'd be good for downing warheads in the ballistic stage of flight is questionable.
"MRI, X-ray, CT"..machines. What do they cost? How many of them roughly speaking could you buy for 100 billion dollars and get installed and working? If the market demand was higher, say from this hundred billion dollar potential customer, would the prices drop? And what are their functional life spans? 5 years, 20 years? I don't know.
MRI and PET units cost between $1 million and $3 million, depending on features and resolution. They have lifespans of 5 to 10 years in many cases. X-ray units cost similar amounts, but generally last longer because they don't require quite the resolution for most things. CT scanners cost between $1 million and $5 million, and depending on the flux of technology, can last for three to ten years. All of these are hardware costs, and do not cover operating costs, which can be considerable, nor do they cover the costs of construction or the technician(s).
I picked 100 billion because that is one half of one year of the iraq war budget for the US.
You're off by a factor of at least two. I went looking for estimates, and one of the least optimistic I found suggested an annualized cost of about $100 billion if we remain through 2015 ($1.2 trillion over 12 years, including nearly $400 billion in debt interest).
What would that save the health care industry and do for sales of the machines and further R&D in those fields if they had that kind of loot available, with the caveat that it was to be used for the legal citizens here who had no health coverage at all, due to lack of funds and employment not providing any?
Less than you think, because the health care industry is mostly privatized, and virtually all of the research is done by companies like Toshiba Medical Systems and GE. In addition, the more someone else picks up the tab, the less likely someone is to pay for it themselves. If you start covering health insurance for those whose employers do not cover it, more employers will stop providing it, raising the cost of the program. Employers currently considering it will skip it to save costs -- and this includes places like state and local governments, who will gladly let the feds handle those costs to ease budget pressures.
My point is, the US has the money, more than enough, we just spend it elsewhere. How about if half of MS income (whatever, some big number) could be diverted by companies saving and using FOSS instead, companies and the government? That would be another huge chunk of available cash to spend on universal healthcare, without taking one penny from anyplace else.
It takes pennies from Microsoft, a company that employs 30,000 people in Washington state alone and which paid $4.3 billion in income taxes on $16.6 billion in profit for 2005. Monies spent on products bought from Microsoft do not just disappear into the bank accounts of Bill Gates; they are used to pay a lot of people, providing them with good salaries and benefits. They go into research programs, hardware purchases, and charitable foundations. They make a decent product, one that is relatively easily implemented en masse. (Full disclosure: I use Linux everyday on my notebook and on several servers. I fight to get FOSS products into my employer's network. But I am also a pragmatist that realizes that Microsoft does largely know what it's doing, even if innovation is stifled.)
Entertainments? How about we as the taxpayers slap a 5 buck a disk tax on entertainment disks? Money towards healthcare. If we have the money for frivolity, that means we should have the money for necessities as well.
You first, then. You stop going to the movies. Disconnect your cable or satellite. No more music CDs or concerts. No more ice cream, no more candy. Take only public transportation anywhere you go. Don't replace anything on your computer that doesn't outright break. Find the cheapest dial-up you can get and use that for internet. These are all 'frivolities
Why are health care costs so high that we need insurance for it?
Because keeping enough nurses around to monitor patients is expensive. Because malpractice insurance is expensive. Because the new machines that allow accurate looks inside of you without going through exploratory surgery (MRI, X-ray, CT) are really expensive.
Why can't the medical training system cut the classroom time? 8 years post-high school for a medical degree to tell me I need AwesomeMed(TM)?
You're looking for a nurse practitioner, someone who can handle basics like physical checkups and common diagnoses such as pneumonia, and then send you off with a prescription for the illness. These are becoming more common as a way of handling the mundane cases.
The excess training about which you complain comes into play when they have to cut you open, when something goes a bit differently than expected after you've been wheeled in after a car wreck. Your doctor (provided you've stayed with the same one for a while) has information about your medical history that the neurosurgeon called in to relieve cranial pressure doesn't have, and won't have because you're in a coma, and that information has to be communicated at a professional and highly technical level.
The difference (presuming you refer to a parliamentary system where the electorate votes on parties instead of candidates) is that instead of trusting a party, we trust a person. I know of very few people who cast truly party-line votes, with at least a few strays here and there. I've voted for Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent (sort of a decline-to-state, not American Independent), and maybe one or two others. I prefer to learn about the person for whom I am voting and understand what he or she believes rather than to trust a party that has more nebulous values and which may put into office someone I believe is unfit to serve.
On the contrary. I do want answers to energy issues, spending, and numerous other issues, but that wasn't really the point. The issue is that Democrats have simply been labeling everything the Republicans do as Very Bad Things(TM), and yet largely failing to come up with solutions of their own, at least on a coherent basis.
If this is an attempt to roll out a vision, then I'm willing to listen. I'm quite tired of the platform on which most of the party has been running, which is essentially, "We're not Republicans." That's not a platform that I can consider useful.
I've been asking for some time for Dems to come up with something more coherent. I may not support it, but at least I can consider the ideas and debate the pros and cons. I don't buy into socialized medicine, but if they have ways of narrowing the insurance gap, I'm willing to listen. I'm not sure how they intend to come up with broadband for everyone, but I'm willing to listen.
What I'm not willing to listen to is, "George Bush is a big liar and he's destroyed the country and that's a bad thing!" My response to people who come up with these kinds of lines is usually, "OK, what specifically is wrong, and how would you fix it?" The usual response to this is that he's a liar and he's destroyed the country and he needs to be removed. That's not a platform. That's a statement of hatred for the man, and it does nothing to address the issues that need to be addressed. (Third parties are often not much better with their complaints about the big two parties locking them out.)
If someone has ideas, be they Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or even from the Peace and Freedom Party, bring them forward. Let's talk. I may not agree with all (or even any) of them, but it's better than the partisan bickering we've got.
This post has been removed by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Revelation of its original contents is a violation of DHS regulations. Violators will be fined, imprisoned, or both.
Not as bad as an atom bomb, but classified along with, say, machineguns and antitank rockets. The software actually got out of the country legally by way of printing it in book format (which was not considered software at the time) and then scanning it in another country and using character recognition and a good deal of editing time to get it to compile properly.
This was also a primary catalyst for the argument of how strong exportable encryption should be, and which brought the encryption debate out into the public eye. Had he not done this, we might be a few years behind our current status, just having finished accepted the appropriateness of exporting heavy encryption.
It's the Free(tm) replacement for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which was originally developed by RSA.
No, PGP wasn't developed by RSA; RSA had nothing at all to do with PGP's development. Use of the RSA asymmetric encryption algorithms has been in use since early versions, but PGP itself was developed by Phil Zimmerman, who got into a patent battle with RSA over his use of the algorithm without their permission (although patent co-holder MIT didn't have a problem with it, complicating the situation). A deal was eventually worked out, and the RSA algorithms have been in ever since.
"Current" nuclear technology is about 40 years old, for the most part. Only a few newer reactors in Europe and Japan improve upon this to come up to relatively recent standards of about a decade old (which is about as new as you can get, factoring in evaluation and licensing). The last US commercial reactor built was planned in the early 1970s using technology from the 1960s, and went live in the very early 1980s, IIRC. The most advanced reactors in the US are probably aboard Navy submarines and carriers, with a few research reactors scattered into the mix.
You can anonymously submit for publication any text you wish and get it distributed if the distributor so desires. This means that you can print up your view, never sign it with a name, and pass it out in a legal method (handing it out on the street, hanging it on doorknobs, etc, depending on local laws) and that's perfectly legal. Posting online should have the same protections -- if it's allowed by the forum operator for you to post something on a forum, then you should be able to do so without providing any more information than the site operator desires. On my forums, all I ask for is a valid e-mail address and some name that complies with a few basic rules.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like a report card on how often he's been right... at all.
I have a few spare cards hanging around, and my main card is only a dual-output. I can drop in an old S3 ViRGE for one of the wings (or even two of them -- I think I have four spares). It would also help clear out some of the junk I have laying around.
It's a niche study, and so I trust the hurricane researchers on the subject more than a general climatologist, much as I would trust a vulcanologist about when an eruption might occur more than I would trust a general-study geologist. The former may have a wider breadth of knowledge, but sometimes depth trumps breadth.
In much the same way as most general climatologists agree that global warming is caused largely by humans, most hurricane researchers seem to agree that the upswing was expected, and while it was quite the wild ride, it was probably an anomaly and not directly related to global warming. It will be interesting to see how many storms come through this year, and how strong they are overall.
Actually, the last Peacekeeper MX was decommissioned in September 2005, and the rocket bodies are being converted to satellite launchers. The remaining Minutemen missiles are having their older warheads replaced with safer, more accurate warheads from the Peacekeepers, though only one warhead is going in each missile to replace the MIRV setup (three each, IIRC) that was there before. In addition, a couple of wings of Minutement were decommissioned, with some of the missiles going to other wings, but a number of them decommissioned. The majority of the nuclear deterrent remains with the Navy's boomers.
Does it bother you that hurricane researchers have said repeatedly that global warming had little or nothing to do with it, and that there was an expected upswell of activity due starting last year, give or take? Or that the US coastline had been dodging the averages for the better part of 20 years, with a far smaller fraction of hurricane strikes than the historic record would otherwise suggest? What will you be saying if the next hurricane season shows lower activity than the last?
That's an interesting idea, and perhaps not too expensive. It may also lend an interesting look to the desktop layout. In addition, having reference documents open in the wings would be easy to do, with primary work in the center.
I shall look into this. Thank you for the suggestion.
People like me who feel constrained by 1280x1024. I've been using 1600x1200 for years, and it can be distracting for me to use lower resolutions. I'd really like to have a nice LCD capable of 1600x1200 (or better) resolution on my desk, but they're still too expensive for me to be able to just drop coin. I have a secondary screen that is nearly dead, and is only good for 800x600 anyway (and ten years of service is a good run), so I may replace that soon with something of a relatively low resolution, but for the main screen, I have to have something high-res.
California is doing this, too. I heard the radio ads a couple of times yesterday for a California Assembly bill, AB2987, that Verizon is backing in an attempt to leverage public support for their efforts to add video services over their private fiber-optic network. The claim within the commercial is that this will have the benefit of increasing competition for customers, thus lowering prices for everyone involved.
Honestly, if Verizon is willing to run fiber into my apartment at decent rates, I'm willing to consider whatever video services they have to offer. I have a maxed-out cable/internet subscription from Adelphia, and it's $150 per month. A couple of years ago, I paid only $120 per month for substantially the same service (albeit with a 3Mbps internet downlink instead of 5Mbps).
Those don't deal with prism at all, though. Prism has to do with the eyes not aligning properly. You can have perfect vision and yet have a prism effect strong enough to require glasses. They force the eyes to align properly by having the center of focus be off-axis. I have an inward-facing prism, which means that my eyes need to be pulled outward; my optometrist has said that there's really not much of a solution out there for this. If I had the reverse situation there are exercises that can be done to pull the eyes inward (focusing on an object pulled towards the nose, for example).
It's quite legal to drive a car you own even without a license, provided you do so only on private land. You can own a truck on a farm and drive it around on that without having a license so long as you never drive it on the public road running next to the land.
I wear glasses for nearsightedness, astigmatism, and inward prism. My optometrist told me last year that I can take care of the first two with laser surgery, but the prism is likely going to have me wearing glasses for the rest of my life. Have you heard of anything that can deal with prism? I realize it's not directly related to the vision clarity, but glasses are annoying.
I'll be looking out for the Slashdot-branded version of it, then.
No, it hasn't ended. It's just been made a lot more difficult for smaller nations. Larger nations like China and Russia (and perhaps India) can launch them from distances sufficiently far away from safe zones where this would fly to make it difficult to shoot them down. The ABL's primary goal is to take out missiles in the boost phase, often when they're over the launcher's territory, so they have to be within a few hundred miles of the launch site to be of any use. Whether they'd be good for downing warheads in the ballistic stage of flight is questionable.
"MRI, X-ray, CT"..machines. What do they cost? How many of them roughly speaking could you buy for 100 billion dollars and get installed and working? If the market demand was higher, say from this hundred billion dollar potential customer, would the prices drop? And what are their functional life spans? 5 years, 20 years? I don't know.
MRI and PET units cost between $1 million and $3 million, depending on features and resolution. They have lifespans of 5 to 10 years in many cases. X-ray units cost similar amounts, but generally last longer because they don't require quite the resolution for most things. CT scanners cost between $1 million and $5 million, and depending on the flux of technology, can last for three to ten years. All of these are hardware costs, and do not cover operating costs, which can be considerable, nor do they cover the costs of construction or the technician(s).
I picked 100 billion because that is one half of one year of the iraq war budget for the US.
You're off by a factor of at least two. I went looking for estimates, and one of the least optimistic I found suggested an annualized cost of about $100 billion if we remain through 2015 ($1.2 trillion over 12 years, including nearly $400 billion in debt interest).
What would that save the health care industry and do for sales of the machines and further R&D in those fields if they had that kind of loot available, with the caveat that it was to be used for the legal citizens here who had no health coverage at all, due to lack of funds and employment not providing any?
Less than you think, because the health care industry is mostly privatized, and virtually all of the research is done by companies like Toshiba Medical Systems and GE. In addition, the more someone else picks up the tab, the less likely someone is to pay for it themselves. If you start covering health insurance for those whose employers do not cover it, more employers will stop providing it, raising the cost of the program. Employers currently considering it will skip it to save costs -- and this includes places like state and local governments, who will gladly let the feds handle those costs to ease budget pressures.
My point is, the US has the money, more than enough, we just spend it elsewhere. How about if half of MS income (whatever, some big number) could be diverted by companies saving and using FOSS instead, companies and the government? That would be another huge chunk of available cash to spend on universal healthcare, without taking one penny from anyplace else.
It takes pennies from Microsoft, a company that employs 30,000 people in Washington state alone and which paid $4.3 billion in income taxes on $16.6 billion in profit for 2005. Monies spent on products bought from Microsoft do not just disappear into the bank accounts of Bill Gates; they are used to pay a lot of people, providing them with good salaries and benefits. They go into research programs, hardware purchases, and charitable foundations. They make a decent product, one that is relatively easily implemented en masse. (Full disclosure: I use Linux everyday on my notebook and on several servers. I fight to get FOSS products into my employer's network. But I am also a pragmatist that realizes that Microsoft does largely know what it's doing, even if innovation is stifled.)
Entertainments? How about we as the taxpayers slap a 5 buck a disk tax on entertainment disks? Money towards healthcare. If we have the money for frivolity, that means we should have the money for necessities as well.
You first, then. You stop going to the movies. Disconnect your cable or satellite. No more music CDs or concerts. No more ice cream, no more candy. Take only public transportation anywhere you go. Don't replace anything on your computer that doesn't outright break. Find the cheapest dial-up you can get and use that for internet. These are all 'frivolities
Why are health care costs so high that we need insurance for it?
Because keeping enough nurses around to monitor patients is expensive. Because malpractice insurance is expensive. Because the new machines that allow accurate looks inside of you without going through exploratory surgery (MRI, X-ray, CT) are really expensive.
Why can't the medical training system cut the classroom time? 8 years post-high school for a medical degree to tell me I need AwesomeMed(TM)?
You're looking for a nurse practitioner, someone who can handle basics like physical checkups and common diagnoses such as pneumonia, and then send you off with a prescription for the illness. These are becoming more common as a way of handling the mundane cases.
The excess training about which you complain comes into play when they have to cut you open, when something goes a bit differently than expected after you've been wheeled in after a car wreck. Your doctor (provided you've stayed with the same one for a while) has information about your medical history that the neurosurgeon called in to relieve cranial pressure doesn't have, and won't have because you're in a coma, and that information has to be communicated at a professional and highly technical level.
The difference (presuming you refer to a parliamentary system where the electorate votes on parties instead of candidates) is that instead of trusting a party, we trust a person. I know of very few people who cast truly party-line votes, with at least a few strays here and there. I've voted for Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent (sort of a decline-to-state, not American Independent), and maybe one or two others. I prefer to learn about the person for whom I am voting and understand what he or she believes rather than to trust a party that has more nebulous values and which may put into office someone I believe is unfit to serve.
Interesting things. As I said before, I may not agree with the entire platform (and I don't), but it makes for some interesting discussion material.
On the contrary. I do want answers to energy issues, spending, and numerous other issues, but that wasn't really the point. The issue is that Democrats have simply been labeling everything the Republicans do as Very Bad Things(TM), and yet largely failing to come up with solutions of their own, at least on a coherent basis.
If this is an attempt to roll out a vision, then I'm willing to listen. I'm quite tired of the platform on which most of the party has been running, which is essentially, "We're not Republicans." That's not a platform that I can consider useful.
I've been asking for some time for Dems to come up with something more coherent. I may not support it, but at least I can consider the ideas and debate the pros and cons. I don't buy into socialized medicine, but if they have ways of narrowing the insurance gap, I'm willing to listen. I'm not sure how they intend to come up with broadband for everyone, but I'm willing to listen.
What I'm not willing to listen to is, "George Bush is a big liar and he's destroyed the country and that's a bad thing!" My response to people who come up with these kinds of lines is usually, "OK, what specifically is wrong, and how would you fix it?" The usual response to this is that he's a liar and he's destroyed the country and he needs to be removed. That's not a platform. That's a statement of hatred for the man, and it does nothing to address the issues that need to be addressed. (Third parties are often not much better with their complaints about the big two parties locking them out.)
If someone has ideas, be they Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or even from the Peace and Freedom Party, bring them forward. Let's talk. I may not agree with all (or even any) of them, but it's better than the partisan bickering we've got.
This post has been removed by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Revelation of its original contents is a violation of DHS regulations. Violators will be fined, imprisoned, or both.
Not as bad as an atom bomb, but classified along with, say, machineguns and antitank rockets. The software actually got out of the country legally by way of printing it in book format (which was not considered software at the time) and then scanning it in another country and using character recognition and a good deal of editing time to get it to compile properly.
This was also a primary catalyst for the argument of how strong exportable encryption should be, and which brought the encryption debate out into the public eye. Had he not done this, we might be a few years behind our current status, just having finished accepted the appropriateness of exporting heavy encryption.
No, PGP wasn't developed by RSA; RSA had nothing at all to do with PGP's development. Use of the RSA asymmetric encryption algorithms has been in use since early versions, but PGP itself was developed by Phil Zimmerman, who got into a patent battle with RSA over his use of the algorithm without their permission (although patent co-holder MIT didn't have a problem with it, complicating the situation). A deal was eventually worked out, and the RSA algorithms have been in ever since.
"Current" nuclear technology is about 40 years old, for the most part. Only a few newer reactors in Europe and Japan improve upon this to come up to relatively recent standards of about a decade old (which is about as new as you can get, factoring in evaluation and licensing). The last US commercial reactor built was planned in the early 1970s using technology from the 1960s, and went live in the very early 1980s, IIRC. The most advanced reactors in the US are probably aboard Navy submarines and carriers, with a few research reactors scattered into the mix.
You can anonymously submit for publication any text you wish and get it distributed if the distributor so desires. This means that you can print up your view, never sign it with a name, and pass it out in a legal method (handing it out on the street, hanging it on doorknobs, etc, depending on local laws) and that's perfectly legal. Posting online should have the same protections -- if it's allowed by the forum operator for you to post something on a forum, then you should be able to do so without providing any more information than the site operator desires. On my forums, all I ask for is a valid e-mail address and some name that complies with a few basic rules.